Gregory Nissan
Photo by Alex Ronan
Bio
Greg Nissan is the author of The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press). His writing and translations have appeared in Asymptote, BOMB, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Frieze, and Two Lines. As a Fulbright scholar he was a member of the University of Potsdam’s Centre for Language, Variation, and Migration from 2015 to 2016. He served as the poetry editor for SAND: Berlin’s English Literary Journal from 2016 to 2018.
Project Description
To support the translation from the German of Banned! An Epic Poem by Ann Cotten. Written in 403 stanzas, Banned! is an experimental epic about information, told from the perspective of a newscaster banished from her station and exiled to a deserted island that is (or is not) a product of her own imagination. With only a knife, a whetstone, and a 1910 encyclopedia as survival tools, she uses the encyclopedia to both make sense of and to create the island, populating it with gryphon-like characters and women who take over the island from men to run utopian small presses. Born in Iowa in 1980, Cotten moved to Austria as a five-year-old with her American parents. She has ranked among the most widely read and acclaimed poets in the German-speaking world, though none of her books have been translated into English.
Because of its vertiginous use of rhyme and its encyclopedic range of reference, Banned! will be a difficult book to translate. The National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship will allow me to cordon off enough time to try to get in the rhythm of this text in a way that best replicates the process of its composition: Cotten wrote the project in a flurry using an old encyclopedia, allowing the form to guide the plot. For an early-career translator, the NEA will afford me the time to see out a vision of this sprawling project and to help generate interest in a fascinating text.